Glossary
Advertising & Tracking Glossary
What ROAS, ROI, CAPI, Lookalike, MoF, BoF, and Click ID actually mean. Explained in plain language, with formulas and worked numbers.
Every entry uses plain language and real numbers. Open a term for the long explanation, its formula, and the mistakes people make with it.
Metrics & Numbers
The numbers that tell you whether advertising makes money.
- ROASReturn on Ad Spend
- ROAS is the ratio between the revenue an ad brings in and the money you spent on that ad. A ROAS of 4 means every $1 of ad spend returned $4 in revenue. It measures gross return, not profit.
- ROIReturn on Investment
- ROI is the profit you earned compared to everything you spent, written as a percentage. An ROI of 50% means every $1 of cost returned $0.50 in profit. Unlike ROAS, ROI counts every cost, not just advertising.
- CPACost per Acquisition
- CPA is the ad spend it takes to get one conversion, such as one purchase or one sign-up. A CPA of $40 means you pay $40 on average for each result. The lower the CPA, the cheaper each result.
- CPLCost per Lead
- CPL is the ad spend it takes to get one lead, meaning one person who left their contact details or started a conversation. A CPL of $15 means every new prospect costs $15 in advertising.
- CPCCost per Click
- CPC is what you pay each time one person clicks your ad. A CPC of $0.80 means every click takes $0.80 from the budget. CPC prices traffic, not results.
- CPMCost per Mille
- CPM is what you pay for one thousand times your ad appears on a screen. A CPM of $25 means a thousand impressions cost $25. CPM prices attention, not clicks and not results.
- CTRClick-Through Rate
- CTR is the percentage of people who clicked your ad out of the people who saw it. A CTR of 2% means 100 impressions produced 2 clicks. It measures how compelling your ad is to the audience receiving it.
- Conversion Rate
- Conversion rate is the percentage of people who took the action you wanted, out of everyone who had the chance to take it. A 3% conversion rate means 100 visitors produced 3 buyers or sign-ups.
- AOVAverage Order Value
- AOV is the average value of one transaction. An AOV of $350 means each order is worth $350 on average. Raising AOV lowers the ROAS you must hit, because each buyer brings in more money.
- LTVLifetime Value
- LTV is the total value one customer brings over their whole life as a customer, not just the first purchase. An LTV of $2,000 means the average customer spends $2,000 before they stop buying.
- Break-even ROAS
- Break-even ROAS is the lowest ROAS at which your ads neither profit nor lose. It comes from your margin: a 25% margin gives a break-even ROAS of 4. Below that line, every extra sale adds to the loss.
- MERMarketing Efficiency Ratio
- MER is the ratio of all your business revenue to all your marketing cost, regardless of which campaign claims the sale. A MER of 5 means every $1 of marketing cost sat alongside $5 of total revenue.
- Impression
- An impression is one time your ad appears on someone screen. A person who sees your ad five times creates five impressions but still counts as one reach. Impressions count appearances, not people.
- Reach
- Reach is the number of different people who saw your ad at least once. A reach of 2,000 means two thousand distinct people saw it, no matter how many times each of them did.
- Frequency
- Frequency is how many times one person sees your ad on average within a period. A frequency of 3 means each person in your audience saw that ad about three times. Too much frequency tires the audience and pushes cost up.
Funnel & Strategy
The stages a buyer passes, from stranger to paying customer.
- Funnel
- A funnel is the set of stages a prospective buyer passes through, from first seeing your ad to finally buying. It is called a funnel because the number of people shrinks at every stage. Its purpose is to show which stage loses the most people.
- ToFTop of Funnel
- ToF is the top stage of the funnel, where people first learn your business exists. At this stage they are not searching for your product and do not trust you yet. The job of a ToF ad is to make people stop and pay attention, not to sell.
- MoFMiddle of Funnel
- MoF is the middle stage of the funnel, where people already know you exist and are comparing options. They are not ready to buy yet, but they are ready to be persuaded. A MoF ad must answer doubts, not repeat the introduction.
- BoFBottom of Funnel
- BoF is the lowest stage of the funnel, where people are ready to buy and only need a final push. The audience is small but the most profitable. A BoF ad must remove the last obstacle, not introduce the product again.
- Lead
- A lead is a prospective buyer who has shown interest by leaving contact details or starting a conversation. One WhatsApp number arriving from an ad is one lead. A lead may never buy, so lead volume alone is not a measure of success.
- Retargeting
- Retargeting shows ads only to people who already interacted with you, such as visiting the website or abandoning a cart. Because the audience already knows you, cost per conversion is usually the lowest of any stage.
- Prospecting
- Prospecting shows ads to people who have never interacted with you, with the goal of finding new buyers. It costs more than retargeting, but without it your warm audience runs out.
- Nurturing
- Nurturing is the practice of keeping leads who are not ready to buy engaged, with useful messages over time, until they are ready. The goal is not to close today, but to be the one they remember when they are ready.
Audience & Targeting
How you decide who receives your ads.
- Targeting
- Targeting is how you decide who is eligible to receive your ads, based on things like location, age, interests, or past behaviour. Good targeting cuts wasted budget, but targeting that is too narrow drives cost up instead.
- Custom Audience
- A Custom Audience is an ad audience built from your own data, such as a customer list, website visitors, or people who messaged you. The ad platform matches that data against its users, then your ad shows only to people on the list.
- Lookalike Audience
- A Lookalike Audience is a new audience the ad platform builds by finding people whose behaviour resembles a list you supplied. Give it a list of your 500 best buyers and it goes looking for others like them.
- Seed Audience
- A seed audience is the list of people you supply as examples when building a Lookalike. A seed of your best buyers produces a Lookalike that hunts buyers. A seed of ordinary visitors produces one that hunts visitors.
- Broad Targeting
- Broad targeting runs ads on a wide audience with few restrictions, often just location and age, and lets the auction find who is most likely to buy. It works when your conversion data is clean and plentiful.
- Exclusion Audience
- An exclusion audience is a list of people you deliberately remove from a campaign, so the ad never shows to them. The most common example is excluding existing buyers from a campaign hunting new buyers.
- Audience Overlap
- Audience overlap happens when two or more of your campaigns target the same people. Your own campaigns then compete in the same auction, so both campaigns cost more without producing more.
- Advantage+
- Advantage+ is a Meta campaign type that hands most targeting, placement, and creative decisions to the system, then optimises against the conversion events you send. Its results depend on the quality of your conversion data.
Tracking & Data
How click and sale data reaches the ad platform.
- Click ID
- A Click ID is a unique code the ad platform attaches to your URL when someone clicks your ad. That code is proof the visit came from one specific ad. When the person buys, the same code is sent back, so the platform knows which ad produced the sale.
- GCLID
- GCLID is the Google Ads Click ID, a unique code Google appends to your URL when someone clicks a Google ad. It is used to send offline conversions back to Google, so Google learns which click produced the sale.
- FBCLID
- FBCLID is the Meta Click ID, a unique code appended to your URL when someone clicks a Facebook or Instagram ad. It is used to form the click identifier sent with conversions, so Meta learns which ad worked.
- Pixel
- A pixel is a small snippet of code you place on your website that records visitor actions and sends them to an ad platform. It runs in the visitor browser, so it only sees what happens on the website and can be blocked.
- CAPIConversions API
- CAPI is a way to send conversion events straight from your server to an ad platform, without depending on the visitor browser. Because it bypasses the browser, CAPI is not blocked and still works for sales that close on WhatsApp, over the phone, or in a shop.
- Server-Side Tracking
- Server-side tracking sends events to ad platforms from your server rather than from the visitor browser. It is not blocked, it can send events that happen days later, and it can report sales that close away from the website.
- Event
- An event is one action a tracking system records and reports, such as viewing a page, adding to cart, starting a chat, or buying. Ad platforms use events as the examples they learn from when deciding who to look for.
- Event ID
- An Event ID is a unique marker for one conversion event. When the same event is sent from both the browser and the server, an identical marker tells the ad platform they are one event, not two.
- Deduplication
- Deduplication is the process of merging events that are really the same, so one sale is not counted twice. It matters when a conversion is sent from both the browser and the server, because without merging your reports show two sales.
- Advanced Matching
- Advanced Matching is how ad platforms match a conversion to the person who clicked, using customer details such as email and phone as one-way codes. It works even when the Click ID has been lost.
- Hashing
- Hashing turns a value into a fixed string of letters and digits that cannot be reversed back to the original. The same value always produces the same code, so two parties can compare codes without exchanging the underlying data.
- First-Party Cookie
- A first-party cookie is a small record stored by the website you are actually visiting. Because it comes from that site, browsers block it far less often than a third-party cookie set by another domain.
- UTM
- UTM parameters are tags you add to a URL yourself to mark where a visit came from. Unlike a Click ID, which the ad platform creates, you write UTMs, so their tidiness depends entirely on your naming discipline.
- Offline Conversion
- An offline conversion is a sale that happens away from the website, such as on WhatsApp, over the phone, or in a shop, and is then reported back to the ad platform. Without that report, the platform never learns its ad made money.
- Event Match QualityEMQ
- Event Match Quality is a score for how well your conversion events can be matched to people on the ad platform. A high score means the platform is confident who converted, so measurement and optimisation are more accurate.
- Attribution
- Attribution is how you decide which ad gets credit for a sale when someone saw several ads before buying. Only one sale happened, so an attribution rule decides who is credited.
- Cross-Domain Tracking
- Cross-domain tracking preserves the identity of one visit when a person moves from one of your domains to another, for example from a landing page to a checkout on a different domain. Without it, that move looks like two separate visits.
- Landing Page
- A landing page is the destination of an ad, built around a single action. Unlike a homepage, which offers many paths, a landing page removes every option except the one you want.
Platforms & Campaigns
Campaign structure and settings inside the ad platforms.
- Campaign, Ad Set, Ad
- A campaign sets the objective and the budget. An ad set decides who is reached, where, and when. An ad is the creative people actually see. Putting a decision at the wrong level is the most common reason campaigns become unreadable.
- CBOCampaign Budget Optimization
- CBO holds the budget at campaign level and lets the system divide it among the ad sets itself. It gives more to ad sets that perform and less to those that do not.
- ABOAd Set Budget Optimization
- ABO puts a separate budget on each ad set, so you decide how much each one receives. It is the setting to use when you want every audience genuinely tested.
- Learning Phase
- The learning phase is the early period while the auction is still finding the pattern of who converts. During it, cost per result swings sharply and the numbers are not yet trustworthy for decisions.
- Dynamic Creative
- Dynamic Creative lets you supply several images, headlines, and body texts to one ad, then lets the system test the combinations itself and show each person the one most likely to work.
- Placement
- A placement is where your ad appears: in feed, in reels, between stories, or in partner apps. Different placements carry different costs and different quality of attention, so their results differ too.
- CTWAClick to WhatsApp
- CTWA is a Meta ad type that opens a WhatsApp conversation with your business when clicked, instead of a website. Because there is no website visit, tracking relies on a special marker that arrives inside the first message.
- Ad Fatigue
- Ad fatigue is when an audience has seen the same ad so often that it stops responding. The signs are plain in the numbers: frequency rises, CTR falls, and cost per result climbs even though you changed nothing.
WhatsApp & Operations
The words that come up while serving customers and closing sales.
- WABAWhatsApp Business Account
- WABA is an official WhatsApp Business account connected to systems through an API rather than a phone app. It lets many people serve one number at once, send template messages, and receive messages straight into your systems.
- Template Message
- A template message is a fixed-format WhatsApp message that must be approved in advance, used to contact people outside an active conversation window. Inside an active window, you can send free-form messages as normal.
- Opt-in
- Opt-in is the permission someone gives you to message them. It must be given clearly and knowingly, never inferred from the fact that you happen to have their number.
- Rotator
- A rotator is one link that splits inbound chats across several numbers or agents in turn. You use one link in every ad, and the split is managed behind it without editing any ad.
- CRMCustomer Relationship Management
- A CRM is the system that records your customers along with their conversation history, status, and transactions. For advertising it is the source of truth: it is where you learn which lead actually paid.
Your ad numbers are only as accurate as the data behind them
Konektor captures the Click ID and sends conversions that close on WhatsApp, over the phone, or in a shop back to the ad platform.